When I was younger, every holiday had its own strange food related tradition.

April fools day brought jello filled eggs and peanut butter toothpaste tubes. St. Patricks day brought green milk and Green sandwiches. At Christmas time we ate copious amounts of meat and various cheese products in the days leading up to Christmas, culminating in the big breakfast where we gorged ourselves on waffles to sop up the excess acids that had built up in our stomaches in the days prior. New years was a big day where we not only mourned the loss of the old year, but also the loss of our winter vacation. One last night of pigging out and drinking sparkling cider straight from the bottle.

Valentines day being of no exception, we had plenty of traditions relating to the holiday.

My mom would wake up early and make me and my sister’s lunches. She would put a valentine in the box as well as one of those miniature boxes of chocolates. You know, the ones that have one caramel, one nut crunch, one maple and one buttercream. Those ones.

My favourites were the neverbashfulwithbutter.comhttp://www.neverbashfulwithbutter.combuttercreams. They made me so happy. I loved the fruit flavour and the chocolate together. It was strange, because I’d always been told that it was just frosting inside the chocolate coating, but I normally hated frosting. They were wrong though, its a little different than frosting. Not much, but a little bit different.

One year, our class had a Valentine party. Everyone came to school with their bags of treats and valentines to hand out to everyone in class. All week long we’d spent the last part of the day working on our valentine mailbox. Thousands of pounds of glitter and glue were used on our mostly pink, red, white and purple construction paper coated shoeboxes.

I remember mine, because I had a big shoe box. Everyone had to bring their own, and it just so happened that my dad had bought new shoes right before then, and my dad has huge feet. So it makes sense that his shoes are equally as large. Size 13 Triple E width. He has to special order them.

So, I had my jumbotron box, coated in glue and covered with pink construction paper. I then proceeded to cut out a bazillion red construction paper hearts, spread glue on them, dip them in chunky silver glitter and adhere them to my box. I think I had some other things on there, but it was mostly pink and silver. I loved it. I even cut a slot in the lid of the box so people could put the valentines in that way. My valentine mail box was the only one with that feature, and I thought that made me special.

So, it was Valentines day, and as per usual, my mom packed the mini box of chocolates. I had plans for it though, so I didnt eat it. I just left it in my lunch box and waited until it was time to hand out our valentines to retrieve it.

There was this boy I had a crush on. It was his first year at our school, and he had these beautiful light blue eyes. He was adorable, and he didnt seem to hang out with the kids that picked on me, so I thought he was safe. Rumour had it that one of the popular girls had a crush on him too, so I had to be careful. knew that if he knew SHE had a crush on him, he’d choose her over me anyday. I kept quiet, but I planned to give him the box of chocolates.. I didnt plan on putting my name on the box, because I didnt really want him to know they were from me. Sure, it sort of made it pointless to give him a special valentine if he didnt know who it came from, but I was so shy I probably would have passed out if I had done otherwise.

It was last recess, and the entire time, me and my two friends leaned up against the monkey merry go-round talking about the party. It was a big deal. Really. I knew that Katie had a huge crush on a boy named Raymond, and my friend Kristen had a big crush on a boy named Paul. They were planning on giving them letters declaring their undying love. It was funny, but hey.. more power to ‘em.

The bell rang and we all ran back to class. Once inside, everyone got into their backpacks and prepared their bag of treats and valentines for deployment. We sat in our seats barely able to contain ourselves.

Once our teacher came into the room, some people started getting up to hand out their Valentines already. She put a quick stop to that. We were to follow directions to the letter.

1. Place your name tag on the desk next to your mailbox.
2. Don’t open your mailbox until all the valentines are handed out.
3. If you brought candy to hand out, you were to pour it into a bowl and she would hand out the candy to each of the students while we were having our snacks and opening our valentines at our desks.

So everyone got up and put their name tags down and started putting valentines in the boxes. When I got to the desk of the boy that I had a crush on, I put the box of chocolates inside his mail box since he, like most of the guys in our class, did not make a lid for his mailbox. I finished pretty quickly and so did my friends, so we stood by the soda table waiting excitedly for everyone else to finish so we could return to our desks and open our boxes to find simular declarations of love from the boys we handed out our special valentines to.

A few sips into our sodas and everyone else was done. We hurried back to our desks (cupcakes in hand) and threw open the lids to our mailboxes, eager to discover what was inside.

While I was searching for a letter from the boy I was enamoured with, I noticed him walking sheepishly up to the front of the classroom. He handed the teacher the box of chocolates I had placed in his mailbox. OH NO! WHAT WAS HE DOING?!

Maybe he thought when she said ‘put the candy in the bowl and she would hand it out’ she also meant that kind of candy. NO YOU IDIOT! She meant little boxes of red and white nerds candy, or those peppermints with the little red hearts in the center. NOT SPECIAL ‘I’M IN LOVE WITH YOU’ BOXES OF CHOCOLATES!!

Then something truely awful happened…

Apparently my mom had decided not to write a separate valentine to me in my lunch box, she just wrote her valentine on the box of chocolates.

How did I know that?

Because the teacher looked at the box of chocolates, flipped it over and laughed. Then she addressed the class with “Sparkie? Your mom wishes you a Happy Valentines Day. Why did you put your box of chocolates on Jeff’s desk?”

Yep, thats right folks. My childhood nickname was sparkie. My mom had been calling me that since I was a baby, because I was so smily all the time. I was like a little spark of energy, was what she told me later.

I had a choice.. Not to say anything and just let everyone wonder who sparkie is, or speak up. I chose to stay silent..

…But my friend Kristen didnt. She said “oh, you mean Andrea.”

Now everyone knew my nickname AND they knew I had a crush on Jeff. I ran out of the room and hid in the hallway bathrooms. Everyone was laughing at me.
I hated Kristen. Why did she have to say anything at all?!

I was in the bathroom about 10 minutes before Katie came in after me. She knew I’d be hiding in there. She had a little white envelope with her.

She said that before I got all huffy about it, she thought I should read this letter that was in my mailbox. She slid it through the crack on the side of the stall and I grabbed it. It just said “To: Andrea” on it. It was about the size of a greeting card.

I opened it and inside there was a little white card with a picture of snoopy on it, holding a little red heart above his head. Inside it said “will you be mine” and at the bottom, it was signed “love, Jeff”

Ever since I was old enough to see the countertops, I’ve taken on another family tradition. Making buttercreams. I LOVE buttercreams. We make them for darn near every food related holiday, especially Valentines day.

So here you have ‘em. I made two flavours this year. The pink hearted one is Strawberry, and the orange hearted one is Chocolate Orange.

]

The cool thing about this recipe is that you can make them darn near any flavour that you want. I usually make orange or strawberry or raspberry, but you could make them any flavour that you can find.

My mom is fond of banana flavoured ones, and my husband really likes cherry flavoured ones. No matter what flavour you want to make, the recipe stays the same.

So here goes-

Ingredients-

4-5 Cups powdered sugar
1/2 Cup Heavy Cream or Whole milk
1 Cup cold butter (2 sticks)

2 teaspoons Flavouring extract of your choice
(you could do dual flavoured creams by using 1 teaspoon of one flavour and 1 teaspoon of another)

About a pound and a half of milk chocolate, semi sweet chocolate or white chocolate, whichever you prefer to coat your creams with.

You will also need-

a handful of heavy duty ziplock bags
Cling film
A tray or plate or cookie sheet that will fit in your freezer
a pair of scissors
A heavy duty stand mixer (or very powerful hand mixer and a strong arm)

Directions-

First you need to soften the butter. Its important that the butter be cold, because warm butter just doesnt give the right creaminess. Place the two sticks of butter in the stand mixer bowl and pulse from low to high speed. Once the butter starts to soften and smoothes out enough that it no longer looks like a stick of butter, and there are no hard chunks, Add a bit of the powdered sugar.

Its important that you add the sugar slowly, or you’ll end up with a face full of it. You can integrate the sugar at a low speed on the mixer.

Once you’ve gotten about 2 cups of the sugar mixed in with the butter, it should be a hard dough. Now you want to add half of the whipping cream or whole milk, until the mixture softens up a bit.

Once the butter and sugar are soft again, whip them up a bit to a fluffier consistancy. Then add the rest of the powdered sugar.

Add the flavouring extract to the leftover milk or cream. If you want to add an artificial colouring at this time (I usually dont unless its for a child or for a party where the colour is important) This would be where to do it. I used 1 teaspoon chocolate extract and 1 teaspoon orange extract for the chocolate orange buttercreams, and I used 2 teaspoons strawberry extract and 1 drop (tiny tiny amount) of lemon extract for the strawberry buttercreams. The lemon enhances the flavour of the strawberry.

Pour the last of the flavour and cream/milk mixture to the bowl with the butter and sugar. Whip the mixture up for about 30 seconds and turn off the mixer.

Scrape as much of the mixture off of the blade as possible. spoon the mixture into one of the heavy duty ziploc bags and set aside.

Cover the tray/cookiesheet/plate with cling film. Snip one of the corners off of the ziploc and pipe little dollups of buttercream onto the cling film. Repeat this process until you’ve made a sufficient amount of creams. You can make large ones or small ones. whatever you’d like.

Put the tray in the freezer and leave it alone for about 20 minutes. The buttercream shouldnt be very soft in the first place, this just hardens it up enough that it wont separate when you dip it into the hot chocolate.

In a separate bowl Melt the chocolate. I usually use the microwave, heating in 30 second intervals, stirring and then heating again, but you can use a double boiler or a big bowl over top of a small pot with water simmering below it.

When you take the buttercreams out of the freezer, you should time it so that the chocolate is at the correct consistancy for dipping.

Using a regular dinner fork or special dipping fork (I use a regular fork) drop the creams one by one into the chocolate, cover them completely and then drop them back onto the cling film covered tray, or onto a separate piece of waxed paper.

Let them cool about 5 minutes, and then drizzle some white chocolate over the top, drop some sprinkles onto the top or roll them into cocoa or nuts. I usually just drizzle white chocolate over top, ’cause its easier and simple and it looks pretty.

I added a couple heart shaped sprinkles especially for valentines day.

Let them cool for another half an hour to hour before moving them from the tray into truffle cups or boxes.

Eat and enjoy! They’re delicious.

mmm. I think I’m going to go eat one right now- HAPPY VALENTINES DAY!

-A.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 28th, 2008 at 2:49 am and is filed under February 2007. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.